American Week 2011

My AmWeek 2011 calling and teaching highlights: Karina and I leading couples dancing with Crowfoot, calling a techno contra, calling for camper open mic, free-form calling in evenings with Will Mentor.

Mary Wesley and I attended morning calling session for squares with Will Mentor and contra with Erik Weburg. Will gave me the opportunity to mimic his freeform squares from the first night. Erik suggested that I be a little more assertive in my calling (rather than saying things in a question-sounding way).

In the afternoons, Karina Wilson and I lead couples dance workshops with the moving music of Crowfoot (Jaige, Adam, and Nickolas). The first day was waltz and moves from uncrossed-hands position, including the cuddle. The second day we did Scandinavian dance, including the Snoa and the Hambo. The last day we continued waltz with moves from crossed-hands position, including cape and skaters. In an additional “waltz-swap” session, dancers “traded licks”, which is such a great idea at dance camps with so many talented dancers.

I got picked to call the techno contra, too. What a great surprise! I called a medley of 3 dances to music that Katie Hepp brought to camp, and Will djed (clicked “play”) from his Mac. Because the music is loud and it’s a medley, I found it helped to call most of the calls all the way through each turn of the dance, only dropping calls for “hook” moves, and having additional prompts like, “something new” or “listen up”, before transitioning to the next dance in the medley. It was more challenging to call because I was behind the speakers and couldn’t hear the music as well as I can with a live band; a monitor with the same mix as the floor would be helpful to hear both the music and my voice.

And some exciting news for me from the BACDS newsletter Winter 2012 about “American Dance & Music Week 2012”:

“Couple dancing including waltzes and other styles will be taught by returning teacher Erik Erhardt. Erik was very well received last July, and we’ve asked him to come back and do it again.”

To be invited back is the biggest complement!

The previous year, 2010, Joyce Miller and Joyce Cooper made sure we were well taken care of! Joyce Cooper, especially, went way out of her way to have a van at the airport parking lot for me and my five wonderful Santa Fe girls. Then, on the way home, Eric Black saved us by giving us (me, Karina, Laurel, Lauren, Mia, Zoe, Chelsea, Tank, Andrew) an emergency place to slumber and threw in an extra “Get out of Hell, free” card, which I hope I don’t have to use with him again… Eric and Diane’s thoughtful caring really makes life wonderful for those around them.

Acumen in Statistics

Erik Barry Erhardt, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of New Mexico Department of Mathematics and Statistics, where he has served as Director of the Statistics Consulting Clinic, and is currently Director of the Biostatistics and NeuroInformatics (BNI) Core for the second phase of the Center for Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) in Brain Function and Mental Illness at the Mind Research Network. His research interests include Bayesian and Frequentist statistical methods for stable isotope sourcing and brain imaging. Erik is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Interfaces Scholar collaborating in interdisciplinary research and offering consulting services in statistics.